The company would like more control over the content that is streamed on Facebook Live, in an effort to prevent suicide or violence from being aired.

Facebook is currently working on developing more energy-efficient computer chips to scan and filter live video content, reported its top artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun.

“Imagine someone using Facebook Live to film their own suicide or murder. You want to be able to remove that kind of content as it happens,” LeCun said Friday in Paris.

Using traditional computer-based monitoring systems to filter each video, both live and recorded, would take “a lot of computing power,” he explained, and it would be very costly in terms of power consumption.

“There’s a big push to design chips that are more energy efficient for that. A large number of companies are working on this, including Facebook,” explained LeCun.

Facebook develops artificial intelligence chips to filter live video content to prevent suicide or violence from being aired

Increasingly, smartphones are packed with high-performance artificial intelligence chips that let users take full advantage of speech recognition, virtual and augmented reality, and video and image rendering straight on their handsets.

This tendency will increase and is encouraging an increasing number of software-focused enterprises to focus on hardware, according to LeCun.

“Facebook has already worked on hardware: it does its own server design, motherboards, its own communication chips for data centers. So this isn’t completely new to Facebook,” admitted LeCun during an interview on Bloomberg.

According to Facebook’s top artificial intelligence scientist, Yann LeCun, even though artificial intelligence assists Facebook in tackling issues such as extremist propaganda, fake accounts and hate speech, it is not yet sufficiently advanced to address many of the urgent social network concerns.

That’s why Facebook decided to work on its own artificial intelligence chips to gain more control over the content that is streamed on Facebook Live, in an effort to prevent suicide or violence from being aired.